Named For The Sunrise
by Haykatsi0o
Summary: Neil and Todd decide to borrow Mr. Keating's record player and Todd speaks poetry. NeilxTodd. My first Dead Poets fanfiction and my first upload to this site, so be kind!
1. Chapter 1

I'm dedicating this one to TuskOfThyme, because without her EXTREMELY kind review, I wouldn't have had the confidence to go through with putting it on here!

The song on the record player is Aria from Goldberg Variations (JUST Aria) by Bach. It's actually pretty cool if you read the scene where they're listening to the music while listening to it as well. Just search for it on YouTube. It's fairly easy to find. (I love Bach with all my heart! I have VERY strong childhood connections to his music.)

* * *

**Named for the Sunrise**

"Neil? Where are you going?"

Neil stopped mid-stride, his hand on the door knob. He turned and looked back at Todd, who was stretched out on his bed among a phalanx of text books.

"Huh?"

"You got up in such a hurry! What are you doing?" His voice was quiet, cautious. This always annoyed Neil. Sometimes it was like Todd didn't trust him yet, after almost four months. It was as if he still thought that Neil would snap at him for saying the wrong things, asking the wrong questions.

"You know that record player Mr. Keating has?" he said.

"The one he brought to class?"

"Yeah. Well, I wanna see if he'll let me listen to it. My father never let me have a radio. I'd forgotten how much I liked music." Neil grinned sheepishly, glancing at his own bed, rather than look at Todd. There was a moment of silence where Neil looked at his feet. He could feel Todd's eyes on him. "Do you want to come with me?" he asked suddenly, looking up.

Todd was somewhat taken aback. "S-sure," he said, almost reflexively. Neil smiled and opened the door.

* * *

Five minutes later, the two were toying with Keating's record player. They'd caught him just as he was about to leave for a staff meeting, and he hadn't hesitated to allow them to use it.

Neil, having no musical preference, cued up the top record in a pile on Keating's desk. As the music began to play, he lay down on the floor and settled himself across the tiny patch of floor in the cramped teaching quarters. Todd looked down at his friend nervously.

"Come on, there's room." Neil was smiling brazenly up at him. He scooted over a few inches, patting the floor next to him. Todd lay down inelegantly next to the other boy, careful to leave a few inches between them. He was uncomfortable at first, not knowing what to do with his body. Should he lie awkwardly on his back with his arms at his sides, or put his hands behind his head as Neil was doing? There wasn't enough room for the both of them to do the latter on the cramped floor, and in the end he decided to roll onto his stomach, his chin resting on his arms.

As the music played, Todd's eyes wandered to Neil's face. His eyes were closed, a soft smile on his lips. The piano aria playing was soft and lilting, full of forlorn youth. He absent-mindedly studied Neil's face as he listened to the music. The perfectly uniform measurement of the notes was bordering on infuriating, and the subtle force with which they were played made it seem almost as if the pianist thought so as well. It was played with restlessly measured grace, steady but unsettled. It seemed strangely fitting.

Neil opened his eyes and Todd looked away a fraction of a second too late. Neil smiled.

"What are you thinking right now?" Neil was genuinely curious.

"I like this song."

"Oh really?" There was laughter in Neil's voice and he rolled over onto his side. He didn't believe him.

"I like the colors." Neil's smile faltered.

"Colors? What do you mean?"

"It's like a sunrise." Todd paused, waiting for a look of understanding to come onto Neil's face that never did. "Have…Have you ever watched the sun rise on a cloudy day? Not-not an entirely cloudy day, when the sky is one…mass…but when it's infinitely layered, and the sun reflects off of the gray and turns it pink and orange like…like burning oil, and the lowest clouds are purple, and light where they should be dark and…defy all…logical laws of where shadows fall, and it's the one time of day that they float and aren't painted on." The question that had first set Todd's faltering monologue in motion had long since been forgotten. "It's the same color as your name," he added flatly, as an afterthought.

His voice was matter-of-fact but hushed. The entire time he was speaking, Todd's eyes wandered as he felt about for the right words. Only when his repertoire of descriptive vocabulary was exhausted did he look back at Neil.

Neil's eyes had never left Todd, dazedly calculating. His lips were parted slightly and for an instant, for once, Neil did not know what to say or do. Todd was briefly reminded of a glimpse he had once caught of Neil, only a few weeks ago. The silent English classroom, lit by the gray light of the Autumn sky through the old windows. But then Neil smiled.

"I don't know how you do that."

"Do what?"

"That!" Neil alleged, squirming closer to Todd on the thinly carpeted floor, eyes wide with vibrant assertion. "That thing you do, where you just open your mouth and poetry comes out!"

"But you can do that too. I-I've seen you, Neil. I've spent the last month running lines with you! You speak poetry all the time." Neil scoffed callously.

"That's not the same. That poetry was handed to me in a script! It's not mine, I didn't make it up. I can't speak—not like that, at least." He started fidgeting and looked at the floor between himself and Todd, continuing to smile. "You know," warm brown glanced up into cool blue "I only kept harassing you about speaking up because I had a feeling you would sooner or later," he laughed. He'd caught up with himself and realized he was embarrassed. He knew that whatever he was feeling at the moment couldn't be right. "I just didn't expect that Sweaty-toothed Madman thing! It was amazing. I'd never be able to do that, not in a million years."

Neil laughed again, feeling awkward around one of his peers for the first time in his life, but still moving closer to Todd with the laugh, barreling on anyway, hoping that the smile would hide his confusion.

Neither boy noticed how close they had gotten until their noses touched. Neil's nervous laugh caught in his throat. There was a moment of complete stillness and silence.

Neil leaned in hesitantly. Todd sat completely still, outwardly lax but the muscles at his core turning to lead, his lips parted slightly. He looked on as Neil continued to inch forward, and he could feel Neil's breath, hot on his own lower lip. Warm brown eyes cautiously studied the cool blue with a glint of tenacity. Both sets of eyes were still open as Neil brought their lips together in a chaste, amateurish kiss. Todd could feel Neil's nose rub against his own, and could hear the absence of breath as their lips touched.

Neil's lips were soft and extremely inviting, but Todd sat submissively, closing his eyes slowly. Neil parted his lips slightly and pressed them more firmly to Todd's, but only for a moment before he pulled awkwardly away, so that only their noses were still touching. The music ended softly and unnoticed.

* * *

Well, my first fanfiction uploaded to FF.N and my first completed(ish) Dead Poets fanfiction. PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEEEEEEEASE review! Constructive criticism please! (I'm still unhappy with the flow of some of my sentences! GAR! And Neil isn't QUITE in character. AND it just cuts off at the end…HALP!)

A coolish note: Neil's "I can't speak unless it's in a script," thing is actually a nod to Robert Sean Leonard. He was saying in an interview that he can't really speak on his own, but once he has a script he's great! (And it's sorta true…he isn't very articulate in real life, but that doesn't mean he doesn't say some pretty darn intelligent things!)


	2. Arguendo

I decided to delete the other two chapters of this story because, honestly, I hated them. I know I got a few people asking for at least one more chapter back when I posted this because the ending is really abrupt, but, really, the last two chapters didn't work AT ALL. Todd was just far too out of character. (And, unlike a lot of people I've come across --both in this fandom and on the internet in general--, I actually care about the characters in my fanfiction being in character. Seriously. What's the point of fanfiction if you get the characters wrong? If you're going to change their personality, you might as well give them a new name and call them an original character. Screwing them up and calling them the same person is just an insult to their original creator.)

**This is a rant I've been LONGING to have, so please bear with me.**

Essentially what happened in the last two chapters of this was more NeilxTodd, Neil being nervous about the NxT but curious and wanting to experiment, and Todd being pissed off about Neil's hesitancy. In this story, I based Todd's personality entirely on the character Steven Carter from Patrick Wilde's play "What's Wrong With Angry?" which asks the question "What's wrong with being angry about the way homosexuals are treated by society?" (Steven is a _very_ angry character because he, as a gay teenager in '90s England – when there was an age of consent to be gay, does not feel he has been treated fairly by society.) I even gave Todd lines paraphrasing Steven's lines.

I wrote those chapters almost a year ago, right after I'd seen "What's Wrong With Angry?" at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, TWICE. I was _obsessed_ with that play. However, in the year since I wrote this, I've done some reassessment of Todd as a character, and I've decided he isn't actually gay, and so his whole frustration with homosexuality once again getting the short end of the stick didn't make any sense at all.

Seriously. We've been given _no _evidence that _any_ of the Dead Poets are actually gay. Kissing another boy in the "spirit of passionate experimentation?" Sure. But actually being gay? Probably not. Don't get me wrong – **I ship Neil x Todd** with all my heart. If any pairing exists, it's Neil and Todd. I can actually back up that pairing – there's evidence for it. However, they don't have to be gay. I _hate_ the idea of homosexual and heterosexual. You can't just be one. I know, I used to claim that I had a theory that Todd was actually gay. I've abandoned that theory. (If you don't believe me, look closely at Todd in the scenes in the cave with the Playboy magazine and that cut scene where he reads his poem the night of the play.) (_If anyone wants to debate this, feel free to PM me! I'm interested in other peoples' viewpoints. Discussing Todd is endlessly exciting. He's such a cool character!_)

PLEASE ANSWER THIS QUESTION!! I don't know if I'm unique in this respect, but when I write fanfiction, I treat it like actual literature, complete with allusions to other texts (like Thoreau and Tennyson – ESPECIALLY Tennyson. You can never have enough of him!) I also usually put a lot of symbolism in my writing (even if it's fanfiction.) I don't know. Does ANYONE else do that, or am I a nerd?


End file.
